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Wednesday, January 18, 2017

A century ago,1913, in one section ofViennalived in the same placeAdolf Hitler(20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945,Leon Trotsky (Russian:Лев Дави́дович Тро́цкий; ; 7 November 1879 – 21 August 1940),Joseph Broz Tito( 7 May 1892 – 4 May 1980),Sigmund Freud( bornSigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) andJoseph Stalin( Russian:Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин; born Ioseb Besarionis je J̌uḡašvili; 18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953). Before some months, this amazing story was on BBC internet page.

Story said that in January 1913, a man whose passport bore the name Stavros Papadopoulos disembarked from the Krakow train at Vienna's North Terminal station. Of dark complexion, he sported a large peasant's moustache and carried a very basic wooden suitcase. "I was sitting at the table," wrote the man he had come to meet, years later, "when the door opened with a knock and an unknown man entered. He was short... thin... his greyish-brown skin covered in pockmarks... I saw nothing in his eyes that resembled friendliness." The writer of these lines was a dissident Russian intellectual, the editor of a radical newspaper called Pravda (Truth). His name was Leon Trotsky. The man he described was not, in fact, Papadopoulos. He had been born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, was known to his friends as Koba and is now remembered as Joseph Stalin.

Trotsky and Stalin were just two of a number of men who lived in central Vienna in 1913 and whose lives were destined to mold, indeed to shatter, much of the 20th century. It was a disparate group. The two revolutionaries, Stalin and Trotsky, were on the run. Sigmund Freud was already well established.The psychoanalyst, exalted by followers as the man who opened up the secrets of the mind, lived and practiced on the city's Berggasse.

The young Josip Broz, later to find fame as Yugoslavia's leader Marshal Tito, worked at the Daimler automobile factory in Wiener Neustadt, a town south of Vienna, and sought employment, money and good times.

Then there was the 24-year-old from the north-west of Austria whose dreams of studying painting at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts had been twice dashed and who now lodged in a doss-house in Meldermannstrasse near the Danube, Adolf Hitler.

Freud's favorite haunt, the Cafe Landtmann, still stands on the Ring, the renowned boulevard which surrounds the city's historic Innere Stadt. Trotsky and Hitler frequented Cafe Central, just a few minutes' stroll away, where cakes, newspapers, chess and, above all, talk, were the patrons' passions.

No-one knows if Hitler bumped into Trotsky, or Tito met Stalin. The empire imploded in 1918, while propelling Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and Tito into careers that would mark world history forever.

Important that you know that Vienna in 1913 was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which consisted of 15 nations and well over 50 million inhabitants. Vienna was, and remains, synonymous with music, lavish balls and the waltz, its dark side was especially bleak. Vast numbers of its citizens lived in slums and 1913 saw nearly 1,500 Viennese take their own lives.

I'm sure that after you read this text, next time when you visit, think or hear about Vienna, you will not think only about music and waltz.